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How much is enough?

Forum Motherboards & Memory : Memory - How much is enough?

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I recently started some video editing and discovered that my Asus A7V333/Athlon XP2000+/512MB DDR 266/ATI 8500LE/40 and 60 gig 7200 maxtor drives is really not that fast after all if your doing some serious video editing and rendering it to a dvd file when your done. This brings me to the dilema of upgrading to more ram. Should I drop in a 512 stick to put me to 1 gig of ram? Will this do me any good? You know the saying, you can never has too much ram when it comes to video editing. Is anyone running at 1 gig of ram and did you notice a difference?

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not having enough ram is not your problem here. the biggest bottle-neck here is your hd, ram bandwidth, fsb and cpu. so more ram isn't really going to do much for you.

the best thing is to get two hard drive that are the same at 7200 rpm (in eide) and do raid. you will see a huge difference here. btw raid 0 that is. oc your fsb and ram. here, you need tons of ram bandwidth. and if you are very serious about this, build a new system. go with scsi 320 and 15000 rpm drives and raid. get the fastest cpu, ram and mobo.

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Reply to scamtrOn

Video editing is one of the few things that you can do on a computer that requires more than 512 megs of RAM. The more ram the better. Most video editing boxes wil start at 1 gig of RAM and go up from there.

Also, a normal setup would be 3 hard drives. One for the OS and the other 2 on RAID 0.

The rest of Scamtrons sugggestions will speed things up as well, but make sure that you have adequate cooling before ocerclocking (increasing your FSB).

Suggestion: First at least double the RAM (since it's cheep now) and increase your FSB (since that's free). Next think about getting another hard drive for RAID. I believe your mobo has the Promise 20276 RAID chip onboard. It's not the best RAID chip you can get but it'll do. After that if it's still not fast enough then add more RAM and think about upgrading the CPU.

PS: I know you're not going to go out and replace everything, but video editing is one of the few things that a P4 is consistently better at than an Athlon. Especially the new hyper threaded P4.

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Reply to knowan

I have to agree with Scamtron. The problem is NOT insufficient RAM but rather on your HDD and CPU.

Video editings like encoding and rendering that use software require the sheer power of your CPU. The faster the CPU the shortest time to get the job done. Memory doesn't play a major role here, it simply won't make a big difference here.

Even with today's fastest P4 CPU, I think you'll still be disappointed with the long time it takes to render your video. That's why many pros don't use PC for video editing.

Reply to elzt

Thanks to all who replied to my post. You all have been a great help, now I'll be ordering some new parts probably and rebuilding my system.

Reply to olrac

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